The labial–coronal effect revisited: Japanese adults say pata, but hear tapa

Abstract

The labial-coronal effect has originally been described as a bias to initiate a word with a labial consonant-vowel-coronal consonant (LC) sequence. This bias has been explained with constraints on the human speech production system, and its perceptual correlates have motivated the suggestion of a perception-production link. However, previous studies exclusively considered languages in which LC sequences are globally more frequent than their counterpart. The current study examined the LC bias in speakers of Japanese, a language that has been claimed to possess more CL than LC sequences. We first conducted an analysis of Japanese corpora that qualified this claim, and identified a subgroup of consonants (plosives) exhibiting a CL bias. Second, focusing on this subgroup of consonants, we found diverging results for production and perception such that Japanese speakers exhibited an articulatory LC bias, but a perceptual CL bias. The CL perceptual bias, however, was modulated by language of presentation, and was only present for stimuli recorded by a Japanese, but not a French, speaker. A further experiment with native speakers of French showed the opposite effect, with an LC bias for French stimuli only. Overall, we find support for a universal, articulatory motivated LC bias in production, supporting a motor explanation of the LC effect, while perceptual biases are influenced by distributional frequencies of the native language.

The role of the input on the development of the LC bias: A crosslinguistic comparison

“…both /bete/ and /tebe/ shifted to /b'te/). Based on these results (extended to Japanese adults by Tsuji, Gonzalez-Gomez, Medina, Nazzi, & Mazuka, 2012), Sato, Vallee, Schwartz, and Rousset (2007) suggested that the LC bias might be explained by the higher articulatory stability of LC sequences compared with CL ones. It is important to emphasize that both articulatory explanations assume the existence of a language-general (that is, non-language specific) LC bias, predicting similar patterns across languages.…”

“…However, Japanese adults did show a perceptual CL bias for these plosive sequences, showing the influence of language exposure on perceptual biases as had been previously suggested (Nazzi et al, 2009;Gonzalez-Gomez & Nazzi, 2012a,b,c). Based on these results, Tsuji et al (2012) concluded that in adulthood there are two different biases, a productive LC bias due to constraints of the articulatory system, and a perceptual CL bias based on distributional frequencies in the lexicon. Moreover, these findings suggest that there might be a default LC bias, defined by articulatory constraints, which will partly (but not entirely) determine the structure of the lexicon across languages, and will lead to both production and perceptual LC biases.…”

“…However, their results were based on a very small sample of words (68 words extracted from a travel dictionary), calling for more thorough analyses. Employing a larger database, Tsuji et al (2012) found that the adult Japanese lexicon in fact has a general LC bias. However, a more fine-grained analysis based on the findings of GonzalezGomez and Nazzi (2012c) revealed that this bias is not homogenously distributed, but changes across consonant classes defined by manner of articulation: the overall LC bias extended to sequences of nasals, while a CL bias was found for plosive sequences.…”

“…In this context, Tsuji et al (2012) explored Japanese adults' production and perception of plosive sequences containing a labial consonant (/p/ or /b/) and a coronal consonant (/t/ or /d/). The results revealed that Japanese adults have an LC bias in production, supporting the explanations in terms of articulatory constraints (MacNeilage & Davis, 2000a;MacNeilage et al, 2000;Sato et al, 2007).…”

“…This is important given that MacNeilage et al (1999) used a corpus having a very small number of words, and that Tsuji et al (2012) used only adult corpora. Thus the present analyses will first allow the verification of these phonotactic properties in the Japanese lexicon.…”